Apr 15, 2023BOOKSThe Colored Fountain: Racism in the United States, Casteism in India(October 11, 2023 update: A new Indian edition of the book has just been published by Aleph under the title Three Countries, Three Lives:...
Sep 22, 2022BOOKS The Academic Uses of ImprisonmentAn inescapable part of editing academic material is Internet research, which can unexpectedly entertain and inform (see The Serendipitous...
May 24, 2022BOOKSTables That Eat Grass and Crows That Fly Upside DownIn the book To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism by Debashish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, I came across this sentence...
Apr 20, 2022BOOKSDiseases Named after PatientsThis passionately written book (The Invention of Surgery by David Schneider) describes the giant strides medicine has made since its...
Mar 6, 2022LANGUAGEThe Mainstreaming of the Word "Shit" in Personal Transformation ParlanceThe book I was editing was about personal transformation for corporate managers. The author was a well-known coach. The language was so...
Dec 25, 2021BOOKSThe Bookseller Who Cannot ReadThis is a wonderful story from the People's Archive of Rural India about a bookseller who cannot read. Selling books is not just a trade...
Dec 9, 2021BOOKSThe Book That Wrote Me a LetterThis email from Better World Books is the most creative letter I've ever received. I was smiling from ear to ear by the time I got to the...
Mar 2, 2021About the BlogOn my home page, I wrote that academic copyediting "is hardly the most exciting profession in the world, but neither is it the most...